U.S. & NATO Assassinations
U.S. & NATO Assassinations
The
following evidence and information regarding U.S. and NATO Assassinations has been submitted on behalf of David Chase Taylor to the government of
Switzerland via the Migration Office of the Canton of Zürich on numerous occasions.
Should Taylor ever be removed from Switzerland, he will be at the mercy of U.S. and NATO nations who currently and openly participate in torture, assassinations, illegal rendition (kidnapping), and operate secret prisons where individuals are detained indefinitely, subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment and ultimately denied due process of law.
Should Taylor ever be removed from Switzerland, he will be at the mercy of U.S. and NATO nations who currently and openly participate in torture, assassinations, illegal rendition (kidnapping), and operate secret prisons where individuals are detained indefinitely, subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment and ultimately denied due process of law.
Given the political ramifications and subsequent blowback of the The Nuclear Bible, especially in revealing and postponing a nuclear terror attack upon the United States, there is
little doubt that the life and safety of David Chase Taylor is now at stake.
Switzerland, a neutral country with a long history independence and political sovereignty, is the only state entity where Taylor will ultimately be protected from a proven and well-grounded fear of persecution.
Switzerland, a neutral country with a long history independence and political sovereignty, is the only state entity where Taylor will ultimately be protected from a proven and well-grounded fear of persecution.
Expected Retaliation from Intelligence Services such as CIA, MI5 or Mossad:
1. Taylor may be TORTURED in
retaliation for his journalistic endeavors
2. Taylor may be SET-UP, CONVICTED, & IMPRISONED for crimes not committed
3. Taylor may be EXTRADITED out of Switzerland to a secret prison
4. Taylor may be ASSASSINATED in an attempt to silence him
5. Taylor may be KIDNAPPED (Illegal Rendition) in order to circumvent the Swiss Asylum process
Assassination Evidence
2. Taylor may be SET-UP, CONVICTED, & IMPRISONED for crimes not committed
3. Taylor may be EXTRADITED out of Switzerland to a secret prison
4. Taylor may be ASSASSINATED in an attempt to silence him
5. Taylor may be KIDNAPPED (Illegal Rendition) in order to circumvent the Swiss Asylum process
The following news articles confirm the fears of David Chase Taylor and substantiate without a doubt that Assassinations are in fact being committed by the United States who have openly stated they will now target Americans anywhere in the world, including NATO nations.
Title: Two 'Rule Of Law' Republicans Dissent On Torture And Assassinations
Date: November 13, 2011
Source: Atlantic
Abstract: In Saturday's debate, the starkest divide among the GOP candidates concerned their willingness to adhere to the law while waging the War on Terrorism. Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul affirmed that they would do so. Every other candidate embraced unlawful positions that would've been unthinkable before 2001. The most important: the use of torture and presidential orders to assassinate American citizens.
Torture
Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich all favor "enhanced interrogation techniques," a euphemism for torture. Lest you doubt that waterboarding, the specific technique they've endorsed, is in fact torture, first note that it too is a euphemism. It refers to blindfolding someone, strapping them to a table, elevating their head, covering their mouth, forcing water through their nose into their sinuses until their lungs fill, and demanding that they reveal their secrets on the promise that if they do, you'll stop forcibly drowning them. If a Pakistani terrorist kidnapped Laura Bush, strapped her to a board, covered her mouth, and forced water through her nose until her lungs filled, would that be torture?
Jon Huntsman made the most eloquent case against waterboarding.
"This country has values," he said. "We have a name brand in the world... I've been an ambassador for my country three times. I've lived overseas and done business. We diminish our standing in the world and the values that we project that include liberty and democracy, human rights and open markets when we torture. We should not torture. Water-boarding is torture. We dilute ourselves down like a whole lot of other countries and we lose our ability to project values that a lot of people in a lot of corners of the world are still relying on the United States to stand up for."
Assassinating American Citizens
President Obama insists that he has the authority to order the assassination of American citizens who haven't been convicted of any crime or afforded due process so long as he first declares -- in a secret process the details of which we're not allowed to know -- that the target is a terrorist. Said one of the moderators during the debate, "Is it appropriate for the American president -- on the president's say so alone -- to order the death of an American citizen suspected of terrorism?"
Mitt Romney fielded the question.
"Absolutely," he said. "In this case, this is an individual who aligned himself with a group who had declared war on the United States of America. And if there's someone who is going to join a group that declares war on America and we're in a war with that entity, then of course, anyone bearing arms with that entity is fair game for the United States of America." What Romney doesn't mention is that if al-Awlaki, the American citizen we've already assassinated, could be killed "on the president's say so alone," than anyone can be killed. Limiting the president's killing authority to targets who "declare war on America" is meaningless if someone can be found guilty of having declared war on America based on the president's say so alone.
That brings us to Newt Gingrich's frightening answer.
MODERATOR: "As president of the United States would you sign that death warrant for an American overseas who you believe is a terrorist suspect?"
GINGRICH: "Well, he's not a terrorist suspect. He's a person who was found guilty under review of actively seeking the death of American citizens."
MODERATOR: "Not found guilty by a court, Sir. He was found guilty by a panel who looked at it and reported to the president. That's extra-judicial. It's not the rule of law."
GINGRICH: "It is the rule of law. That is explicitly false. It is the rule of law. If you engage in war against the United States, you are an enemy combatant. You have none of the civil liberties of the United States. You cannot go to court... Waging war on the United States is outside criminal law.
What is Gingrich ignoring?
In Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court addressed the case of an American citizen declared an enemy combatant by the Bush Administration, which asserted that he took up arms and fought with the Taliban. As Sandra Day O'Connor affirmed in her majority opinion, "due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision-maker."
Ron Paul was the savior on this issue.
"We're at war against a tactic and therefore there's no limit to it," he said, condemning Obama's assassinations. "We create these monstrosities and we do things outside the law... You want to live within the law. And obey the law. Because otherwise it's going to be very bad for all of us. And this whole idea that now we can be assassinated by somebody we don't even like to run our medical care, they're giving this power to the president to be the prosecutor, the executor, the judge and the jury." As Adam Serwer mused on Twitter, "Paul remark goes at heart of contradiction of modern conservatism: Government is only infallible when it kills people."
Conclusions
Perhaps the most substantively absurd moment of the debate was when Michele Bachmann said, "Today under Barack Obama, he is allowing the ACLU to run the CIA." In fact, the ACLU has explicitly criticized the way Obama has waged the War on Terrorism generally, and actually joined the Center for Constitutional Rights in filing the lawsuit that tried to prevent the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. Bachmann is either breathtakingly ignorant here or else lying.
Either way, she is just one of many candidates in the GOP field to show the folly of running to Obama's right on foreign policy. He surged troops into Afghanistan, killed Osama bin Laden, launched an undeclared war on Libya in violation of the War Powers Resolution, is waging another undeclared war using drones in Pakistan, and has taken most of the steps his hawkish critics say they'd implement in Iran. In other words, there actually is no coherent critique from the right to make unless it's so extreme in its war-mongering that a country tired of spilling blood and treasure abroad will pass.
Among the candidates at the debate, Huntsman and Paul are the only ones who can credibly attack Obama on the foreign policy grounds where he is weakest: his radicalism on executive power, illegal war in Libya, civil liberties violations, the destabilizing effect of his drone war on Pakistan, and the fact that he has an assassination list with the names of American citizens crossed off it (Atlantic, 2011).
Title: Ron Paul Warns Journalists: You Could Be Next On Obama’s ‘Kill List’
Date: October 7, 2011
Source: Yahoo News
Abstract: At a recent luncheon at the National Press Club, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul warned journalists that they could be placed on a “kill list” should the government deem them a threat to national security. The Associated Press reported that the Texas congressman encouraged journalists and citizens alike to condemn the President’s actions, lest they find themselves placed on the list for their own views.
“Can you imagine being put on a list because you’re a threat?” an exasperated Paul asked. “What’s going to happen when they come to the media? What if the media becomes a threat? … This is the way this works. It’s incrementalism.”
His statements come in the aftermath of the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen killed by a CIA drone in Yemen last month.
Decisions about whom to place on the “kill list” are reportedly made by secret panel of federal government officials whose deliberations are withheld from public view.
“There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said,” Reuters reported Thursday. ”Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.”
The role of the president in the process is unclear, although he is informed of the panel’s decisions.
Rep. Paul is not the only critic of the government’s actions.
In a statement last week, ACLU legal director Jameel Jaffer condemned the administration for what he called “a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts.”
“It is a mistake to invest the President — any President — with the unreviewable power to kill any American whom he deems to present a threat to the country,” Jaffer concluded.
Although the Obama administration has refused to release evidence that definitely links al-Awlaki to specific acts of terrorism, it has claimed he was behind two failed terror attempts on American soil.
In a statement made after al-Awlaki’s death, President Obama said it represented a “significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaida and its affiliates” (Yahoo News, 2011).
Title: Secret Panel Can Put Americans On "Kill List'
Date: October 5, 2011
Source: Reuters
Abstract: American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials. There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.
The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process.Current and former officials said that to the best of their knowledge, Awlaki, who the White House said was a key figure in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda's Yemen-based affiliate, had been the only American put on a government list targeting people for capture or death due to their alleged involvement with militants.
The White House is portraying the killing of Awlaki as a demonstration of President Barack Obama's toughness toward militants who threaten the United States. But the process that led to Awlaki's killing has drawn fierce criticism from both the political left and right.
In an ironic turn, Obama, who ran for president denouncing predecessor George W. Bush's expansive use of executive power in his "war on terrorism," is being attacked in some quarters for using similar tactics. They include secret legal justifications and undisclosed intelligence assessments.
Liberals criticized the drone attack on an American citizen as extra-judicial murder.
Conservatives criticized Obama for refusing to release a Justice Department legal opinion that reportedly justified killing Awlaki. They accuse Obama of hypocrisy, noting his administration insisted on publishing Bush-era administration legal memos justifying the use of interrogation techniques many equate with torture, but refused to make public its rationale for killing a citizen without due process.
Some details about how the administration went about targeting Awlaki emerged on Tuesday when the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was asked by reporters about the killing.
The process involves "going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president, but the National Security Council does the investigation, they have lawyers, they review, they look at the situation, you have input from the military, and also, we make sure that we follow international law," Ruppersberger said.
LAWYERS CONSULTED
Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described.
They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC "principals," meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval. The panel of principals could have different memberships when considering different operational issues, they said.
The officials insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
They confirmed that lawyers, including those in the Justice Department, were consulted before Awlaki's name was added to the target list.
Two principal legal theories were advanced, an official said: first, that the actions were permitted by Congress when it authorized the use of military forces against militants in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001; and they are permitted under international law if a country is defending itself.
Several officials said that when Awlaki became the first American put on the target list, Obama was not required personally to approve the targeting of a person. But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals' decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.
A former official said one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to "protect" the president.
Officials confirmed that a second American, Samir Khan, was killed in the drone attack that killed Awlaki. Khan had served as editor of Inspire, a glossy English-language magazine used by AQAP as a propaganda and recruitment vehicle.
But rather than being specifically targeted by drone operators, Khan was in the wrong place at the wrong time, officials said. Ruppersberger appeared to confirm that, saying Khan's death was "collateral," meaning he was not an intentional target of the drone strike.
When the name of a foreign, rather than American, militant is added to targeting lists, the decision is made within the intelligence community and normally does not require approval by high-level NSC officials.
'FROM INSPIRATIONAL TO OPERATIONAL'
Officials said Awlaki, whose fierce sermons were widely circulated on English-language militant websites, was targeted because Washington accumulated information his role in AQAP had gone "from inspirational to operational." That meant that instead of just propagandizing in favor of al Qaeda objectives, Awlaki allegedly began to participate directly in plots against American targets.
"Let me underscore, Awlaki is no mere messenger but someone integrally involved in lethal terrorist activities," Daniel Benjamin, top counterterrorism official at the State Department, warned last spring.
The Obama administration has not made public an accounting of the classified evidence that Awlaki was operationally involved in planning terrorist attacks.
But officials acknowledged that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki's hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.
For instance, one plot in which authorities have said Awlaki was involved Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner on Christmas Day 2009 with a bomb hidden in his underpants.
There is no doubt Abdulmutallab was an admirer or follower of Awlaki, since he admitted that to U.S. investigators. When he appeared in a Detroit courtroom earlier this week for the start of his trial on bomb-plot charges, he proclaimed, "Anwar is alive."
But at the time the White House was considering putting Awlaki on the U.S. target list, intelligence connecting Awlaki specifically to Abdulmutallab and his alleged bomb plot was partial. Officials said at the time the United States had voice intercepts involving a phone known to have been used by Awlaki and someone who they believed, but were not positive, was Abdulmutallab.
Awlaki was also implicated in a case in which a British Airways employee was imprisoned for plotting to blow up a U.S.-bound plane. E-mails retrieved by authorities from the employee's computer showed what an investigator described as " operational contact" between Britain and Yemen.
Authorities believe the contacts were mainly between the U.K.-based suspect and his brother. But there was a strong suspicion Awlaki was at the brother's side when the messages were dispatched. British media reported that in one message, the person on the Yemeni end supposedly said, "Our highest priority is the US ... With the people you have, is it possible to get a package or a person with a package on board a flight heading to the US?"
U.S. officials contrast intelligence suggesting Awlaki's involvement in specific plots with the activities of Adam Gadahn, an American citizen who became a principal English-language propagandist for the core al Qaeda network formerly led by Osama bin Laden.
While Gadahn appeared in angry videos calling for attacks on the United States, officials said he had not been specifically targeted for capture or killing by U.S. forces because he was regarded as a loudmouth not directly involved in plotting attacks (Reuters, 2011).
Title: Confirmed: Obama Authorizes Assassination Of U.S. CitizenDate: April 7, 2010
Source: Salon
Abstract: In late January, I wrote about the Obama administration’s “presidential assassination program,” whereby American citizens are targeted for killings far away from any battlefield, based exclusively on unchecked accusations by the Executive Branch that they’re involved in Terrorism. At the time, The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest had noted deep in a long article that Obama had continued Bush’s policy (which Bush never actually implemented) of having the Joint Chiefs of Staff compile “hit lists” of Americans, and Priest suggested that the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was on that list. The following week, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations. Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield. I wrote at length about the extreme dangers and lawlessness of allowing the Executive Branch the power to murder U.S. citizens far away from a battlefield (i.e., while they’re sleeping, at home, with their children, etc.) and with no due process of any kind. I won’t repeat those arguments — they’re here and here — but I do want to highlight how unbelievably Orwellian and tyrannical this is in light of these new articles today.
Just consider how the NYT reports on Obama’s assassination order and how it is justified:
Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist. He then dispatches his aides to run to America’s newspapers — cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they’re granted — to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist. It is simply asserted that Awlaki has converted from a cleric who expresses anti-American views and advocates attacks on American military targets (advocacy which happens to be Constitutionally protected) to Actual Terrorist ”involved in plots.” These newspapers then print this Executive Verdict with no questioning, no opposition, no investigation, no refutation as to its truth. And the punishment is thus decreed: this American citizen will now be murdered by the CIA because Barack Obama has ordered that it be done. What kind of person could possibly justify this or think that this is a legitimate government power?
Just to get a sense for how extreme this behavior is, consider — as the NYT reported — that not even George Bush targeted American citizens for this type of extra-judicial killing (though a 2002 drone attack in Yemen did result in the death of an American citizen). Even more strikingly, Antonin Scalia, in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, wrote an Opinion (joined by Justice Stevens) arguing that it was unconstitutional for the U.S. Government merely to imprison (let alone kill) American citizens as “enemy combatants”; instead, they argued, the Constitution required that Americans be charged with crimes (such as treason) and be given a trial before being punished. The full Hamdi Court held that at least some due process was required before Americans could be imprisoned as “enemy combatants.” Yet now, Barack Obama is claiming the right not merely to imprison, but to assassinate far from any battlefield, American citizens with no due process of any kind. Even GOP Congressman Pete Hoekstra, when questioning Adm. Blair, recognized the severe dangers raised by this asserted power.
And what about all the progressives who screamed for years about the Bush administration’s tyrannical treatment of Jose Padilla? Bush merely imprisoned Padilla for years without a trial. If that’s a vicious, tyrannical assault on the Constitution — and it was — what should they be saying about the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s assassination of American citizens without any due process?
All of this underscores the principal point made in this excellent new article by Eli Lake, who compellingly and comprehensively documents what readers here well know: that while Obama’s “speeches and some of his administration’s policy rollouts have emphasized a break from the Bush era,” the reality is that the administration has retained and, in some cases, built upon the core Bush/Cheney approach to civil liberties and Terrorism. As Al Gore asked in his superb 2006 speech protesting Bush’s ”War on the Constitution”:
Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?
If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?
If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?
Notice the power that was missing from Gore’s indictment of Bush radicalism: the power to kill American citizens. Add that to the litany — as Obama has now done — and consider how much more compelling Gore’s accusatory questions become.
When Obama was seeking the Democratic nomination, the Constitutional Law Scholar answered a questionnaire about executive power distributed by The Boston Globe‘s Charlie Savage, and this was one of his answers:
So back then, Obama said the President lacks the power merely to detain U.S. citizens without charges. Now, as President, he claims the power to assassinate them without charges. Could even his hardest-core loyalists try to reconcile that with a straight face? As Spencer Ackerman documents today, not even John Yoo claimed that the President possessed the power Obama is claiming here.
If you’re going to go into the comment section — or anywhere else — and argue that this is all justified because Awlaki is an Evil, Violent, Murdering Terrorist Trying to Kill Americans, you should say how you know that. Generally, guilt is determined by having a trial where the evidence is presented and the accused has an opportunity to defend himself — not by putting blind authoritarian faith in the unchecked accusations of government leaders, even if it happens to be Barack Obama. That’s especially true given how many times accusations of Terrorism by the U.S. Government have proven to be false.
Congratulations, Barack Obama: you’re now to the Right of National Review on issues of executive power and due process, as Kevin Williamson objects: ”Surely there has to be some operational constraint on the executive when it comes to the killing of U.S. citizens. . . . Odious as Awlaki is, this seems to me to be setting an awful and reckless precedent. “ But Andy McCarthy — who is about the most crazed Far Right extremist on such matters as it gets, literally — is as pleased as can be with what Obama is doing (or, as Gawker puts it, “Obama Does Something Bloodthirsty Enough to Please the Psychos”) (Salon, 2010).
Title: Can Obama Assassinate Americans?
Date: February 25, 2010
Source: CATO Institute
Abstract: On September 14 in Somalia, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a long-sought link between al-Qaida and its East African allies, was in a vehicle bombed by a helicopter flying from an American ship off the Somali coast. As Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick reported in a front-page Washington Post story -- "Under Obama, more targeted killings than captures in counterterrorism efforts" (Feb. 13) -- another U.S. helicopter "set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of (Nabhan's) remains for DNA verification." That news story offered a telling consequence: "the opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever." And a senior military officer, careful not to give his name, lamented: "We wanted to take a prisoner. It was not a decision that we made."
That decision came from Obama, our commander in chief, who, as I've previously reported, has authorized in his first year more such assassinations than Bush and Cheney in their last years. The result, as the Washington Post noted, "has been dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions."
After all, there can be no fierce arguments about whether a charred corpse should be tried in a federal civilian court or by a military commission. Some American citizens, believed to be highly connected to al-Qaida or its affiliates, are also on these "hit" lists. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, pilotless U.S. drone planes have perpetrated these assassinations.
Thanks to the First Amendment, an increasing number of these summary executions have been revealed in the Washington Post and on the Internet. The executive branch alone decides who shall die instantly. And there are no defense attorneys to raise objections, even when an American citizen is marked for oblivion.
During a Feb. 3 hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testified that the U.S. intelligence community, when dealing with direct terrorist threats to the United States, does "take direct action against terrorists" (Washington Post, Feb. 4).
And "if we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that."
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer turned news analyst, avoids euphemisms. "Special permissions" without judicial authorization, says Greenwald, amounts to "basically giving the president the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial" (Salon.com, Feb. 4).
Focusing on American targets, Ben Wizner, a staff attorney of the ACLU National Security Project, in a Feb. 4 press release emphasizes: "It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified 'threat.'"
I would add that if the threat has indeed been specified, the deceased target will have had no chance to test its accuracy. Is this America?
Wizner explains:
"This is the most recent consequence of a troublingly overbroad interpretation of Congress's 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. This sweeping interpretation envisions a war that knows no borders or definable time limits and targets an enemy that the government has refused to define in public. This policy is particularly troubling since it targets U.S. citizens, who retain their constitutional right to due process even when abroad."
Adds Jonathan Manes, legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project: "While there is little doubt that a U.S. citizen fighting for an enemy army could lawfully be killed on the battlefield in the course of fighting, this policy goes far beyond the ordinary parameters of battlefield combat."
Does President Obama agree with George W. Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft? And the silent Obama avoids any responsibility for the growing number of innocent civilians killed by the insistently growing number of strikes by our pilotless drones.
When will members of Congress also ask these questions? And how about we, the people, getting involved in finding out whether some of these killings committed in our name are -- by our own laws and international treaties -- actual war crimes?
Where are our chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, Republican leaders and the Tea Party legions opposed to boundless big government? (CATO Institute, 2010).
Date: November 13, 2011
Source: Atlantic
Abstract: In Saturday's debate, the starkest divide among the GOP candidates concerned their willingness to adhere to the law while waging the War on Terrorism. Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul affirmed that they would do so. Every other candidate embraced unlawful positions that would've been unthinkable before 2001. The most important: the use of torture and presidential orders to assassinate American citizens.
Torture
Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich all favor "enhanced interrogation techniques," a euphemism for torture. Lest you doubt that waterboarding, the specific technique they've endorsed, is in fact torture, first note that it too is a euphemism. It refers to blindfolding someone, strapping them to a table, elevating their head, covering their mouth, forcing water through their nose into their sinuses until their lungs fill, and demanding that they reveal their secrets on the promise that if they do, you'll stop forcibly drowning them. If a Pakistani terrorist kidnapped Laura Bush, strapped her to a board, covered her mouth, and forced water through her nose until her lungs filled, would that be torture?
Jon Huntsman made the most eloquent case against waterboarding.
"This country has values," he said. "We have a name brand in the world... I've been an ambassador for my country three times. I've lived overseas and done business. We diminish our standing in the world and the values that we project that include liberty and democracy, human rights and open markets when we torture. We should not torture. Water-boarding is torture. We dilute ourselves down like a whole lot of other countries and we lose our ability to project values that a lot of people in a lot of corners of the world are still relying on the United States to stand up for."
Assassinating American Citizens
President Obama insists that he has the authority to order the assassination of American citizens who haven't been convicted of any crime or afforded due process so long as he first declares -- in a secret process the details of which we're not allowed to know -- that the target is a terrorist. Said one of the moderators during the debate, "Is it appropriate for the American president -- on the president's say so alone -- to order the death of an American citizen suspected of terrorism?"
Mitt Romney fielded the question.
"Absolutely," he said. "In this case, this is an individual who aligned himself with a group who had declared war on the United States of America. And if there's someone who is going to join a group that declares war on America and we're in a war with that entity, then of course, anyone bearing arms with that entity is fair game for the United States of America." What Romney doesn't mention is that if al-Awlaki, the American citizen we've already assassinated, could be killed "on the president's say so alone," than anyone can be killed. Limiting the president's killing authority to targets who "declare war on America" is meaningless if someone can be found guilty of having declared war on America based on the president's say so alone.
That brings us to Newt Gingrich's frightening answer.
MODERATOR: "As president of the United States would you sign that death warrant for an American overseas who you believe is a terrorist suspect?"
GINGRICH: "Well, he's not a terrorist suspect. He's a person who was found guilty under review of actively seeking the death of American citizens."
MODERATOR: "Not found guilty by a court, Sir. He was found guilty by a panel who looked at it and reported to the president. That's extra-judicial. It's not the rule of law."
GINGRICH: "It is the rule of law. That is explicitly false. It is the rule of law. If you engage in war against the United States, you are an enemy combatant. You have none of the civil liberties of the United States. You cannot go to court... Waging war on the United States is outside criminal law.
What is Gingrich ignoring?
In Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court addressed the case of an American citizen declared an enemy combatant by the Bush Administration, which asserted that he took up arms and fought with the Taliban. As Sandra Day O'Connor affirmed in her majority opinion, "due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision-maker."
Ron Paul was the savior on this issue.
"We're at war against a tactic and therefore there's no limit to it," he said, condemning Obama's assassinations. "We create these monstrosities and we do things outside the law... You want to live within the law. And obey the law. Because otherwise it's going to be very bad for all of us. And this whole idea that now we can be assassinated by somebody we don't even like to run our medical care, they're giving this power to the president to be the prosecutor, the executor, the judge and the jury." As Adam Serwer mused on Twitter, "Paul remark goes at heart of contradiction of modern conservatism: Government is only infallible when it kills people."
Conclusions
Perhaps the most substantively absurd moment of the debate was when Michele Bachmann said, "Today under Barack Obama, he is allowing the ACLU to run the CIA." In fact, the ACLU has explicitly criticized the way Obama has waged the War on Terrorism generally, and actually joined the Center for Constitutional Rights in filing the lawsuit that tried to prevent the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. Bachmann is either breathtakingly ignorant here or else lying.
Either way, she is just one of many candidates in the GOP field to show the folly of running to Obama's right on foreign policy. He surged troops into Afghanistan, killed Osama bin Laden, launched an undeclared war on Libya in violation of the War Powers Resolution, is waging another undeclared war using drones in Pakistan, and has taken most of the steps his hawkish critics say they'd implement in Iran. In other words, there actually is no coherent critique from the right to make unless it's so extreme in its war-mongering that a country tired of spilling blood and treasure abroad will pass.
Among the candidates at the debate, Huntsman and Paul are the only ones who can credibly attack Obama on the foreign policy grounds where he is weakest: his radicalism on executive power, illegal war in Libya, civil liberties violations, the destabilizing effect of his drone war on Pakistan, and the fact that he has an assassination list with the names of American citizens crossed off it (Atlantic, 2011).
Title: Ron Paul Warns Journalists: You Could Be Next On Obama’s ‘Kill List’
Date: October 7, 2011
Source: Yahoo News
Abstract: At a recent luncheon at the National Press Club, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul warned journalists that they could be placed on a “kill list” should the government deem them a threat to national security. The Associated Press reported that the Texas congressman encouraged journalists and citizens alike to condemn the President’s actions, lest they find themselves placed on the list for their own views.
“Can you imagine being put on a list because you’re a threat?” an exasperated Paul asked. “What’s going to happen when they come to the media? What if the media becomes a threat? … This is the way this works. It’s incrementalism.”
His statements come in the aftermath of the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen killed by a CIA drone in Yemen last month.
Decisions about whom to place on the “kill list” are reportedly made by secret panel of federal government officials whose deliberations are withheld from public view.
“There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said,” Reuters reported Thursday. ”Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.”
The role of the president in the process is unclear, although he is informed of the panel’s decisions.
Rep. Paul is not the only critic of the government’s actions.
In a statement last week, ACLU legal director Jameel Jaffer condemned the administration for what he called “a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts.”
“It is a mistake to invest the President — any President — with the unreviewable power to kill any American whom he deems to present a threat to the country,” Jaffer concluded.
Although the Obama administration has refused to release evidence that definitely links al-Awlaki to specific acts of terrorism, it has claimed he was behind two failed terror attempts on American soil.
In a statement made after al-Awlaki’s death, President Obama said it represented a “significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaida and its affiliates” (Yahoo News, 2011).
Title: Secret Panel Can Put Americans On "Kill List'
Date: October 5, 2011
Source: Reuters
Abstract: American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials. There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.
The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process.Current and former officials said that to the best of their knowledge, Awlaki, who the White House said was a key figure in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda's Yemen-based affiliate, had been the only American put on a government list targeting people for capture or death due to their alleged involvement with militants.
The White House is portraying the killing of Awlaki as a demonstration of President Barack Obama's toughness toward militants who threaten the United States. But the process that led to Awlaki's killing has drawn fierce criticism from both the political left and right.
In an ironic turn, Obama, who ran for president denouncing predecessor George W. Bush's expansive use of executive power in his "war on terrorism," is being attacked in some quarters for using similar tactics. They include secret legal justifications and undisclosed intelligence assessments.
Liberals criticized the drone attack on an American citizen as extra-judicial murder.
Conservatives criticized Obama for refusing to release a Justice Department legal opinion that reportedly justified killing Awlaki. They accuse Obama of hypocrisy, noting his administration insisted on publishing Bush-era administration legal memos justifying the use of interrogation techniques many equate with torture, but refused to make public its rationale for killing a citizen without due process.
Some details about how the administration went about targeting Awlaki emerged on Tuesday when the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was asked by reporters about the killing.
The process involves "going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president, but the National Security Council does the investigation, they have lawyers, they review, they look at the situation, you have input from the military, and also, we make sure that we follow international law," Ruppersberger said.
LAWYERS CONSULTED
Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described.
They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC "principals," meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval. The panel of principals could have different memberships when considering different operational issues, they said.
The officials insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
They confirmed that lawyers, including those in the Justice Department, were consulted before Awlaki's name was added to the target list.
Two principal legal theories were advanced, an official said: first, that the actions were permitted by Congress when it authorized the use of military forces against militants in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001; and they are permitted under international law if a country is defending itself.
Several officials said that when Awlaki became the first American put on the target list, Obama was not required personally to approve the targeting of a person. But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals' decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.
A former official said one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to "protect" the president.
Officials confirmed that a second American, Samir Khan, was killed in the drone attack that killed Awlaki. Khan had served as editor of Inspire, a glossy English-language magazine used by AQAP as a propaganda and recruitment vehicle.
But rather than being specifically targeted by drone operators, Khan was in the wrong place at the wrong time, officials said. Ruppersberger appeared to confirm that, saying Khan's death was "collateral," meaning he was not an intentional target of the drone strike.
When the name of a foreign, rather than American, militant is added to targeting lists, the decision is made within the intelligence community and normally does not require approval by high-level NSC officials.
'FROM INSPIRATIONAL TO OPERATIONAL'
Officials said Awlaki, whose fierce sermons were widely circulated on English-language militant websites, was targeted because Washington accumulated information his role in AQAP had gone "from inspirational to operational." That meant that instead of just propagandizing in favor of al Qaeda objectives, Awlaki allegedly began to participate directly in plots against American targets.
"Let me underscore, Awlaki is no mere messenger but someone integrally involved in lethal terrorist activities," Daniel Benjamin, top counterterrorism official at the State Department, warned last spring.
The Obama administration has not made public an accounting of the classified evidence that Awlaki was operationally involved in planning terrorist attacks.
But officials acknowledged that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki's hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.
For instance, one plot in which authorities have said Awlaki was involved Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner on Christmas Day 2009 with a bomb hidden in his underpants.
There is no doubt Abdulmutallab was an admirer or follower of Awlaki, since he admitted that to U.S. investigators. When he appeared in a Detroit courtroom earlier this week for the start of his trial on bomb-plot charges, he proclaimed, "Anwar is alive."
But at the time the White House was considering putting Awlaki on the U.S. target list, intelligence connecting Awlaki specifically to Abdulmutallab and his alleged bomb plot was partial. Officials said at the time the United States had voice intercepts involving a phone known to have been used by Awlaki and someone who they believed, but were not positive, was Abdulmutallab.
Awlaki was also implicated in a case in which a British Airways employee was imprisoned for plotting to blow up a U.S.-bound plane. E-mails retrieved by authorities from the employee's computer showed what an investigator described as " operational contact" between Britain and Yemen.
Authorities believe the contacts were mainly between the U.K.-based suspect and his brother. But there was a strong suspicion Awlaki was at the brother's side when the messages were dispatched. British media reported that in one message, the person on the Yemeni end supposedly said, "Our highest priority is the US ... With the people you have, is it possible to get a package or a person with a package on board a flight heading to the US?"
U.S. officials contrast intelligence suggesting Awlaki's involvement in specific plots with the activities of Adam Gadahn, an American citizen who became a principal English-language propagandist for the core al Qaeda network formerly led by Osama bin Laden.
While Gadahn appeared in angry videos calling for attacks on the United States, officials said he had not been specifically targeted for capture or killing by U.S. forces because he was regarded as a loudmouth not directly involved in plotting attacks (Reuters, 2011).
Title: Confirmed: Obama Authorizes Assassination Of U.S. CitizenDate: April 7, 2010
Source: Salon
Abstract: In late January, I wrote about the Obama administration’s “presidential assassination program,” whereby American citizens are targeted for killings far away from any battlefield, based exclusively on unchecked accusations by the Executive Branch that they’re involved in Terrorism. At the time, The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest had noted deep in a long article that Obama had continued Bush’s policy (which Bush never actually implemented) of having the Joint Chiefs of Staff compile “hit lists” of Americans, and Priest suggested that the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was on that list. The following week, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations. Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield. I wrote at length about the extreme dangers and lawlessness of allowing the Executive Branch the power to murder U.S. citizens far away from a battlefield (i.e., while they’re sleeping, at home, with their children, etc.) and with no due process of any kind. I won’t repeat those arguments — they’re here and here — but I do want to highlight how unbelievably Orwellian and tyrannical this is in light of these new articles today.
Just consider how the NYT reports on Obama’s assassination order and how it is justified:
The Obama
administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted
killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks
on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.
. . .
American counterterrorism
officials say
Mr. Awlaki is an operative of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate
of the terror network in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They say they believe that he
has become a recruiter for the terrorist network, feeding prospects into plots
aimed at the United States and at Americans abroad, the officials said.
It is
extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for
targeted killing, officials said. A former senior legal official in the
administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was
approved for targeted killing under the former president. . . .
“The danger
Awlaki poses to this country is no longer confined to words,” said an American official, who like other current and former
officials interviewed for this article spoke of the classified counterterrorism
measures on the condition of anonymity.
“He’s gotten involved in plots.”
No due
process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No
evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations
(which he has done vehemently through his family). None of
that. Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist. He then dispatches his aides to run to America’s newspapers — cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they’re granted — to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist. It is simply asserted that Awlaki has converted from a cleric who expresses anti-American views and advocates attacks on American military targets (advocacy which happens to be Constitutionally protected) to Actual Terrorist ”involved in plots.” These newspapers then print this Executive Verdict with no questioning, no opposition, no investigation, no refutation as to its truth. And the punishment is thus decreed: this American citizen will now be murdered by the CIA because Barack Obama has ordered that it be done. What kind of person could possibly justify this or think that this is a legitimate government power?
Just to get a sense for how extreme this behavior is, consider — as the NYT reported — that not even George Bush targeted American citizens for this type of extra-judicial killing (though a 2002 drone attack in Yemen did result in the death of an American citizen). Even more strikingly, Antonin Scalia, in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, wrote an Opinion (joined by Justice Stevens) arguing that it was unconstitutional for the U.S. Government merely to imprison (let alone kill) American citizens as “enemy combatants”; instead, they argued, the Constitution required that Americans be charged with crimes (such as treason) and be given a trial before being punished. The full Hamdi Court held that at least some due process was required before Americans could be imprisoned as “enemy combatants.” Yet now, Barack Obama is claiming the right not merely to imprison, but to assassinate far from any battlefield, American citizens with no due process of any kind. Even GOP Congressman Pete Hoekstra, when questioning Adm. Blair, recognized the severe dangers raised by this asserted power.
And what about all the progressives who screamed for years about the Bush administration’s tyrannical treatment of Jose Padilla? Bush merely imprisoned Padilla for years without a trial. If that’s a vicious, tyrannical assault on the Constitution — and it was — what should they be saying about the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s assassination of American citizens without any due process?
All of this underscores the principal point made in this excellent new article by Eli Lake, who compellingly and comprehensively documents what readers here well know: that while Obama’s “speeches and some of his administration’s policy rollouts have emphasized a break from the Bush era,” the reality is that the administration has retained and, in some cases, built upon the core Bush/Cheney approach to civil liberties and Terrorism. As Al Gore asked in his superb 2006 speech protesting Bush’s ”War on the Constitution”:
Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?
If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?
If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?
Notice the power that was missing from Gore’s indictment of Bush radicalism: the power to kill American citizens. Add that to the litany — as Obama has now done — and consider how much more compelling Gore’s accusatory questions become.
When Obama was seeking the Democratic nomination, the Constitutional Law Scholar answered a questionnaire about executive power distributed by The Boston Globe‘s Charlie Savage, and this was one of his answers:
5. Does the Constitution permit a
president to detain US citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants?
[Obama]: No.
I reject the Bush Administration’s claim that the President has plenary
authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as
unlawful enemy combatants.So back then, Obama said the President lacks the power merely to detain U.S. citizens without charges. Now, as President, he claims the power to assassinate them without charges. Could even his hardest-core loyalists try to reconcile that with a straight face? As Spencer Ackerman documents today, not even John Yoo claimed that the President possessed the power Obama is claiming here.
If you’re going to go into the comment section — or anywhere else — and argue that this is all justified because Awlaki is an Evil, Violent, Murdering Terrorist Trying to Kill Americans, you should say how you know that. Generally, guilt is determined by having a trial where the evidence is presented and the accused has an opportunity to defend himself — not by putting blind authoritarian faith in the unchecked accusations of government leaders, even if it happens to be Barack Obama. That’s especially true given how many times accusations of Terrorism by the U.S. Government have proven to be false.
Congratulations, Barack Obama: you’re now to the Right of National Review on issues of executive power and due process, as Kevin Williamson objects: ”Surely there has to be some operational constraint on the executive when it comes to the killing of U.S. citizens. . . . Odious as Awlaki is, this seems to me to be setting an awful and reckless precedent. “ But Andy McCarthy — who is about the most crazed Far Right extremist on such matters as it gets, literally — is as pleased as can be with what Obama is doing (or, as Gawker puts it, “Obama Does Something Bloodthirsty Enough to Please the Psychos”) (Salon, 2010).
Title: Can Obama Assassinate Americans?
Date: February 25, 2010
Source: CATO Institute
Abstract: On September 14 in Somalia, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a long-sought link between al-Qaida and its East African allies, was in a vehicle bombed by a helicopter flying from an American ship off the Somali coast. As Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick reported in a front-page Washington Post story -- "Under Obama, more targeted killings than captures in counterterrorism efforts" (Feb. 13) -- another U.S. helicopter "set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of (Nabhan's) remains for DNA verification." That news story offered a telling consequence: "the opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever." And a senior military officer, careful not to give his name, lamented: "We wanted to take a prisoner. It was not a decision that we made."
That decision came from Obama, our commander in chief, who, as I've previously reported, has authorized in his first year more such assassinations than Bush and Cheney in their last years. The result, as the Washington Post noted, "has been dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions."
After all, there can be no fierce arguments about whether a charred corpse should be tried in a federal civilian court or by a military commission. Some American citizens, believed to be highly connected to al-Qaida or its affiliates, are also on these "hit" lists. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, pilotless U.S. drone planes have perpetrated these assassinations.
Thanks to the First Amendment, an increasing number of these summary executions have been revealed in the Washington Post and on the Internet. The executive branch alone decides who shall die instantly. And there are no defense attorneys to raise objections, even when an American citizen is marked for oblivion.
During a Feb. 3 hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testified that the U.S. intelligence community, when dealing with direct terrorist threats to the United States, does "take direct action against terrorists" (Washington Post, Feb. 4).
And "if we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that."
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer turned news analyst, avoids euphemisms. "Special permissions" without judicial authorization, says Greenwald, amounts to "basically giving the president the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial" (Salon.com, Feb. 4).
Focusing on American targets, Ben Wizner, a staff attorney of the ACLU National Security Project, in a Feb. 4 press release emphasizes: "It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified 'threat.'"
I would add that if the threat has indeed been specified, the deceased target will have had no chance to test its accuracy. Is this America?
Wizner explains:
"This is the most recent consequence of a troublingly overbroad interpretation of Congress's 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. This sweeping interpretation envisions a war that knows no borders or definable time limits and targets an enemy that the government has refused to define in public. This policy is particularly troubling since it targets U.S. citizens, who retain their constitutional right to due process even when abroad."
Adds Jonathan Manes, legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project: "While there is little doubt that a U.S. citizen fighting for an enemy army could lawfully be killed on the battlefield in the course of fighting, this policy goes far beyond the ordinary parameters of battlefield combat."
Does President Obama agree with George W. Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft? And the silent Obama avoids any responsibility for the growing number of innocent civilians killed by the insistently growing number of strikes by our pilotless drones.
When will members of Congress also ask these questions? And how about we, the people, getting involved in finding out whether some of these killings committed in our name are -- by our own laws and international treaties -- actual war crimes?
Where are our chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, Republican leaders and the Tea Party legions opposed to boundless big government? (CATO Institute, 2010).
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